POP REVIEW

POP REVIEW; 'Just a Girl,' Or Wishing To Be More?

By KELEFA SANNEH

Published: October 26, 2002

It was Monday night at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y., and Gwen Stefani was leading the audience in a chant of ''I'm just a girl.'' After a few repetitions, Ms. Stefani smiled and finished the lyric: ''Wanna know something? I'm just a girl because that's all that you'll let me be!''

Was she addressing her fans, joking about the demands of stardom? Or was she addressing a lover, lodging a bitter complaint about a relationship gone awry? Maybe it didn't really matter. Ms. Stefani's band, No Doubt, played frenetic dance songs, lugubrious ballads and nearly everything in between. She sang them all with the same playful energy, and the people in the audience seemed to be having almost as much fun as the people onstage.

It hasn't always been easy to enjoy No Doubt. The group once specialized in a rather callow hybrid of punk and ska, with nearly every song dominated by Ms. Stefani's mannered vocals. Her addiction to vibrato probably should have been chronicled in the group's episode of ''Behind the Music.''

Along the way, something unusual happened: fame and fortune turned No Doubt into a much better band. Ms. Stefani has established herself as a charming celebrity, beloved in part for the clothes she wears. (In Uniondale, she wore a tight top with horizontal blue stripes and baggy trousers with vertical red stripes.) And last year the group released ''Rock Steady'' (Interscope), an excellent disc that pulls in a wide range of collaborators: the hip-hop songwriters the Neptunes, the techno-pop hitmaker William Orbit, the reggae producers Steely & Clevie, the new-wave pioneer Ric Ocasek.

Monday's performance balanced strong new songs with older, more uneven material, but the show centered on the three sublime singles the band has released from ''Rock Steady.''

The first is ''Hey Baby,'' a buoyant dance hall reggae track based on a computerized riff. The bassist Tony Kanal and the guitarist Tom Dumont both switched to keyboard, to better recreate the synthetic sound of the recorded version, while Ms. Stefani called out the title phrase.

The second of these singles is ''Hella Good,'' a spiky electro-punk song that sounds like a smartly produced Gwen Stefani solo track. Near the end, Mr. Dumont added a guitar solo, and then there was a series of ricocheting electronic noises.

The third of these singles is ''Underneath It All,'' the band's current hit, a lovely reggae ballad. The group laid down a subdued reggae pulse; the reggae singer Lady Saw came out to sing her verse. Best of all, Ms. Stefani proved that -- with the help of a 12-step program, perhaps -- she has finally kicked her vibrato addiction.

Photo: Gwen Stefani of the band No Doubt performing at the Nassau Coliseum. (Rahav Segev for The New York Times)